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Sniper release: little features, big impact

Back in May, we released some big stuff, like payroll in Australia and checks for the USA. We’ve also got some big stuff in the pipeline well through development and coming soon – like remittance advices and multiple budgets. But we live by the phrase “release early, release often,” so today the Sniper team are releasing some improvements.

From tweaks to My Xero to cash basis P&L (Income Statement) and Balance Sheet reports, this release is full of little things that you’ve been asking for and that can make a big difference.

My Xero
We’ve upgraded My Xero to help the increasingly large number of accountants and bookkeepers who have lots of clients on Xero. These upgrades help our Partners:

Enjoy better performance. The organization list loads independently to the rest of the dashboard making the whole page load faster.

Search for organizations more efficiently. Searching for an organization now gives you access to functions like billing information as well as being able to go straight to their accounts.

Also, keep an eye out for the style changes we’ve implemented across the entire application.

Xero Business
We’ve added a few things to speed up some common day to day tasks;

Added “favorite” functionality to the general settings menu, so you can give yourself fast access to the settings you use most frequently.

Smarter memorization logic on the bank reconciliation screen. Makes bank reconciliation faster for everyone, but it’ll be especially helpful if you reconcile lots of transactions.

Approving lots of invoices is now faster. When you approve an invoice, you can be automatically taken to the next invoice in the list, great if you’re responsible for approving a number of invoices in one go.

New “favorite” feature in the general settings menu

We’ve also added a cash basis option to the P&L (Income Statement) and Balance Sheet reports. Our US customers have been asking for this, but it’s relevant for anyone who wants a cash only view of their business.

Conversion
Businesses have lots of data, so we do everything to help move that data to Xero from other systems. This makes it easier for business owners to start using Xero and helps our Partners convert clients to Xero. Today we’ve added two things to make the conversion process easier:

Tracking categories on fixed asset imports, which is handy when an asset is spread across multiple categories.

Balances on the Chart of Accounts import, saving you precious time entering this in separately.

To find out what else we’ve been up to, head on over to the release notes.

@James, the changes we made to bank reconciliation were centered around making it faster – the functionality is the same.

Payee information is remembered for our partner bank feeds – but if you’re using a Yodlee powered feed then the payee information is generally contained within the reference fields, along with other information, so can’t easily be used to trigger memorization.

“Remittance Advice” is always under the “Coming Soon” heading on the last few sets of release notes – is it ever going to actually show up? I would have thought this was more important than some of the other stuff coming through.

Some great “little” features in there. I’m especially loving the tracking codes on fixed assets. That really helps alot with some of the clients I setup.
I’m also finding the cash P&L helpful for certain reporting.

I’m eagerly anticipating the remittance advices. Great to know you are almost there.

Had my fingers crossed that EC sales lists and Intrastat was going to be released. Even held off my clients reports just in case, but looks like I still have several hours of work I can bill for a while yet.

These are all useful improvements that benefit users, especially Xero Accountants. However, why are American spellings like “Favorite” and “Organization” creeping in? Xero is a proud New Zealand company, started here and prospering worldwide from here. Let’s stick with proper spelling!

Personally, I’m not liking the new organisation listing. At least before it had the live filter when we started typing the organisation name into the search box. Now we need to go to the organisations tab, for that same live filter, but of course, MY XERO is the default page… sign.
Also it seems like there’s something slightly broken in the FIND & MATCH screen, with the amounts for invoices/transactions appearing on a seperate line from the date & invoice number?

Checked a bit more on the language thing. Inside the Xero applications we are doing variants of English so cater for Checks and Cheques depending on what country your company is in. It is straight forward to do that in an application. On the blog, where we use WordPress, there is only one version and it’s not easy to do word substitution.

Hey Rod, whats your India strategy? Back in India I was helping a Kiwi company with Xero. I also demonstrated the product to few CAs and they liked it. I am happy to discuss a go-to-market for India whenever you are in Auckland. Keep up the good work!

Guys, new to the Xero software and unsyure if we are missing something but can we not add signatures to our invoices when sending? All we can see is manual input rather than a signed ‘designed’ company template.

Just reconciling some accounts – and here’s a little change that would save me lots of little clicks…

If you suggest a match in the bank rec, and I click ‘6 Other Possible Matches Found’ I suggest it’s likely that the original Xero suggestion is wrong. Could it be unticked automatically at that point? Otherwise when I click the right suggestion the match box goes from green to blue, and I have to go and until one of the two selected transations – which both need reading as I’m not sure what the sort order is.